Sunday, July 28, 2013

A Cookbook Grown in Accord and Ready to Devour

I want Dina Falconi to take me home and feed me. The local herbalist is the author of Foraging & Feasting: A Field Guide and Wild Food Cookbook, created in collaboration with botanical illustrator Wendy Hollender. It's a banquet of a book, combining botany with foraging and cookery to delicious effect.

Some 50 elegant and earthy botanical drawings by Hollender lead you into the book like a breadcrumb trail through a magic meadow. Expositions by Falconi on the art of foraging for wild foods, from amaranth to red clover, inspire a kitchen revolution. Who needs supermarkets, or even tended gardens? The main ingredients here are available in your own backyard, growing willfully and wild all around us.

At any good party, we end up in the kitchen. And that's where Foraging & Feasting eventually takes us, with recipes inspired by handpicked edibles and crafted to delight. Wild-berry smoothies, herbal dips, green goddess salads, wild green pestos, soups, frittatas, and casseroles invite us to the table. Falconi's creativity is contagious, as most every section begins with a master recipe followed by suggested variations to make the dish your own.

Ushering in a post-Martha Stewart world of rugged individualism in the kitchen, and a work of art with its classically lush drawings, Foraging & Feasting is ultimately a call to action for a more wholesome and connected way to live and eat. Like its wild flora, the book is homegrown - self-published by the author and illustrator through their Accord-based publishing company, Botanical Arts Press.